Key ideas: Published in 1962. “Along came 1950, and the Sunday supplement writers had something new to engage their talents. The achievements of the human race, especially the American branch of it, during the first half of the nineteenth century made good copy. Every accomplishment of note, in science, art, industry and sports, received proper notice. Except one. . . And that one achievement of the last fifty years is far more important from the long term point of view than anything. It was the transmutation of the American character from individualist to collectivism. . . Anybody can make a machine, but the unmaking of a national character is the work of genius.” (F. Chodorov)
The life of the old middle class man was, by present standards, rather prosaic, even humdrum, being enlivened only by plans for expanding his business. If he had dreams, these were concerned with getting ahead by means of serving his community better, of widening the scope of his enterprise.
But, his personal life was quite orderly and quite free of eroticisms; rarely was it disturbed by divorce or scandal. His sense of self-reliance imposed on him a code of conduct that precluded psychopathic adventures and gave him stability. Orderliness in his personal life was necessary to his main purpose, which was to produce more goods or render more services for the market; that burned up all the surplus energy he had at his disposal.
It never occurred to this middle class man that society owed him a living, or that he might apply to the government for help in the solution of his problems.
It is most difficult to find a cause and effect relationship to explain changes in the ethic of a people, as, for instance, the transmogrification of the freedom-loving (and therefore self-reliant) American of times past into one leaning on society.
Undoubtedly, ideas have consequences, and the current urgency to turn to government for assistance in solving life’s problems might be traced to the socialistic and populist ideas promulgated during the last part of the nine- tenth century. But, ideas must be institutionalized before the mass of people can accept, or even comprehend, them…
The first of these ideas to attract the attention of the politicians was the income tax; the socialists and populists advocated this as a “soak the rich” measure, purely out of the covetousness which is in all men’s hearts, but the politicians took to it because more taxation means more power. And getting and exercising power is the principal business of the politician…
The one facet of human nature which, because of its invariability and constancy, we can put down as a natural law is: man always seeks to satisfy his desires with the least effort.
It is because of this inner compulsion that man invents labor-saving devices, and it is also because of this inner compulsion that man sometimes turns to exploiting his neighbor, which is a form of robbery.
But, robbery is attended with the use of force, which might be met with a contrary and defeating force, and is therefore risky; however, when the government, which has a monopoly of coercion, exercises its power so as to favor one individual or set of individuals to the disadvantage of others, there is nothing to do but to comply with its edicts.
And, because its edicts are regularized by law, mental adjustment to the exploitation takes place, while the recipients of the advantages thus gained learn to look upon their loot as a “right.”
“We were,” said an old graduate, “a self-selective group. Out of the many thousands who got through grammar school less than four hundred entered high school. Why? Well, maybe our parents urged us, maybe we had an inner compulsion for an education. At any rate, after we got into high school we had to make the grade or get out. There was no watering down of the courses for those who had no stomach for learning.”
“The point is,” chimed in another, “those who dropped out were not downgraded, socially or industrially, for their inability to master Latin or English composition. It was generally accepted as a fact that some were educable and others were not. I went to high school and to college, but a brother of mine, to my father’s disappointment, decided against an education and went to work in a jewelry store. When he died, a few years ago, he left an estate worth nearly a million.”
“That’s right,’ resumed the philosopher.”The fact that a boy was not a book-learner was not held against him. He might be intelligent enough for business, but his mind was not attuned to abstractions. And, as many of us know, he got a head start in business which put many of us at a competitive disadvantage when we entered the arena some four or eight years later. Maybe our education helped us win out in the long run, maybe it did not. At any rate, we were the educable and the others were not, and that’s all there was to it.”
They were talking of a value that obtained a half century ago, before democracy took over the educational system….
But, aside from that concession to the democratic spirit which was creeping into the field of education long before Professor John Dewey gave the democratic spirit a philosophy, the high school hung on to standards. One had to meet those standards or get out….
So, high schools proliferated and colleges followed suit, until, at long last, it has become necessary for a boy or girl to sport a degree in order to make his or her way at jobs where education would be a handicap. Not only that, but attendance at school has been made compulsory until the sixteenth, and in some states until the eighteenth, birthday, regardless of any interest in learning, and the current trend is to subsidize the “rubbish” through college. Everybody has to be educated.
This democratic ideal is commendable and one wishes it could be realized. But, nature enters an interposition: some children simply do not have the capacity to absorb the “best that has been thought and said in this world’ and no matter how long they are exposed to this cultural stuff it does not rub off on them.… Nature simply has not given them the equipment.
However, the democratic spirit recognizes no natural law of differentiation in individual capacities. It rests its case on the assumption that all men are born equal and proceeds to prove it by the device of re-defining education.
In the early part of the century some remnants of the classical tradition remained, in which education was held to be a process of mental training, the object being to develop the mind of the student to the full extent of its capacities; it was an individual experience, unrelated to any group, and intended to bring the best to the top…. the high school courses, to say nothing of college curricula, were geared to the educable.
But this was inconsistent with democratic egalitarianism. So, the educators, influenced by the rising voice of the demos, altered the definition of education: it became a process of utilitarian training, purely functional in character, and designed to bring about intellectual uniformity.…
Furthermore it makes no difference what is learned, so long as the student makes his daily appearance in class, week in and week out, year in and year out, until the compulsory limit is arrived at—and a diploma is accorded him. Then all will be educated, and equally.
Whether or not the ideas of Dr. Dewey were instrumental in bringing about this change of values in education is difficult to say; in all likelihood, the real cause was the democratic spirit which had got hold of the country during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and Dr. Dewey just came along at the propitious moment to give the egalitarian urge the respectability of a philosophy; if it hadn’t been he, somebody else would have propounded the same or similar ideas. It was time for a change.
The idea of compulsory education for all youngsters in the rudiments of learning was rooted in Thomas Jefferson’s formula, but it was not until the post-Civil War period that it blossomed in the sunshine of populism and in the rain of socialism….
If everybody were equally educated, so ran the litany, everybody would be able to reach the heights, economically, socially and, perhaps, culturally. And so came the Land Grant colleges, to feed which with fodder came an increase in the number of high schools, and junior high schools and junior colleges for those not able to meet the transition from lower to higher learning, and ultimately, an increase in the age of compulsory elementary training; in this last the democrats were aided by the unionists, who were anxious to keep the labor market free of apprentices as long as possible.
After all, education is a process of transmitting values, and the values acquired by the instructors during their youth will be the ones they transmit to their students.
Even though the instructors, being by nature idealists, were succumbing to the alluring phrases of democracy, they nevertheless in their functional capacity held on to the aristocratic values in which they had been inculcated. The high school I attended had a faculty of that sort, and its regimen was severe.
Then came Dr. Dewey with his new values in education. Its primary purpose, he held, was not to develop the intellectual capacities of the individual, but rather to prepare him to take his proper place in his social environment; the curriculum must be designed to fit that end.
The student should not be required to meet any given standards, but the standards should be accommodated to the student. In fact, he maintained, since there is no absolute truth, standards are meaningless, and education should concentrate on the instrumental facts of life, on the functional disciplines….
If the purpose of education is social adjustment, then individual excellence must be minimized or discouraged, and the ideal of democracy—the egalitarian society—will be achieved.
If the purpose of education is social adjustment, then individual excellence must be minimized or discouraged, and the ideal of democracy—the egalitarian society—will be achived.
The more democracy the more governmental intervention. That is because the mob cannot tolerate excellence and, having political power in their hands, will use it to reduce the educable to their own level.
The new value in education must be traced to the introduction of tax-supported, compulsory education during the nineteenth century; that was the beginning. To be sure, for a long time private schools, especially colleges, held on to the traditional disciplines and standards, catering to the educable elite, and by example influenced the character of public schooling. But the mob, being in the majority, and having the power of government in its hands, could not be forever gainsaid. It whittled away resistance to its demands until at long last education took on a new character; it no longer sought out the best minds for development but became a means of effecting egalitariansim.
If I were to vote for the “lesser of two evils” I would in fact be subscribing to whatever that “evil” does in office. He could claim a mandate for his official acts, a sort of blank check, with my signature, into which he could enter his performances. My vote is indeed a moral sanction, upon which the official depends for support of his acts, and without which he would feel rather naked.
In a democracy the acquiescence of the citizenry is necessary for the operation of the State, and a large vote is a prelude for such acquiescence. Even in a totalitarian state the dictators feel it necessary to hold elections once in a while, just to assure themselves and others of the validity of their rule; though the voting is compulsory and the ballot is onesided, they can point to the large percentage of the electorate who underwrite their rule.
In a free election, even though the difference between the candidates is a matter of personality, or between tweedledee and tweedledum, the successful candidate (though he might be the “lesser of two evils”) can similarly maintain that he holds a mandate from the people. It is to the credit of a democracy that I can choose not to vote. I am not compelled to give my moral support to an evil.
Getting back to the economic advantages that the candidates promise me, in exchange for my vote, my reason tells me that they cannot make good on their promises, except by taking something from my fellow men and delivering it to me For, government is not a producer.
Therefore, when it undertakes to improve the economy, it is compelled by its own limitations to the taking from one group of citizens and giving to another; it uses its monopoly of coercion for the distribution of wealth, not for the production of wealth.
So that, when I vote for the candidate who promises me betterment in my economic condition, I am condoning and encouraging some form of robbery. That does not square with my moral values.
I would like to vote for a candidate who pledged himself to abolish taxation, in toto, for my reason tells me that underlying all the ills of society is this predatory institution. I would surely profit if I were not taxed, and so would all the producers; the only ones who would suffer from such an arrangement would be the drones, the bureaucrats, who would be compelled to work for their keep.
But, since the abolition of taxes would put the politician out of a job and would make impossible his dispensation of special privileges, it is not likely that I shall have the opportunity of casting my ballot for such a candidate. Lacking that opportunity, I see no reason for registering my faith in the “lesser of two evils;” if memory serves me right, the “lesser” of either party who attained office has always increased the taxes I have to pay.
All in all, I see no good reason for voting and have refrained from doing so for about a half century. During that time, my more conscientious compatriots (including, principally, the professional politicians and their ward heelers) have conveniently provided me with presidents and with governments, all of whom have run the political affairs of the country as they should be run—that is, for the benefit of the politicians.
They have put the nation into two major wars and a number of minor ones. Regardless of what party was in power, the taxes have increased and so did the size of the bureaucracy. Laws have been passed, a whole library of them, and most of these laws, since they are not selfenforcing, have called for interminably interpreted the laws which created them and thus have spawned more laws. enforcement agencies, who have interminably interpreted the laws which created them and thus have spawned more laws.
The effect of these laws is:
Would it have been different if I had voted? I don’t think so.
It is interesting to speculate on what would happen if, say, seventy-five percent of the electorate refrained from casting their ballots; more than that is out of the question, for at least a quarter of the voting public are concerned with what they can get for themselves from the election of this or that candidate; their belly-interest is entirely too strong to keep them away from the polls.
In the first place, the politicians would not take such a repudiation of their custodianship in good grace. We can take it for granted that they would undertake to make voting compulsory, bringing up the hoary argument that a citizen is morally obligated to do his duty.
If military service can be made compulsory why not political service? And so, if three-quarters of the citizenry were to refrain from voting, a fine would be imposed on first offenders and more dire punishment meted out to repeaters. The politician must have the moral support of a goodly number of votes.
Putting aside compulsion, what might be the effect on the citizenry and the social order if an overwhelming majority should quit voting? Such abstinence would be tantamount to giving this notice to politicians: since we as individuals have decided to look after our public affairs, your services are no longer required. Having assumed social power we would, as individuals, have to assume social responsibility.
The job of looking after community affairs would devolve on all of us. We might hire an expert to tell us about the most improved fire-fighting apparatus, or a street cleaning manager, or an engineer to build us a bridge; but the final decision, particularly in the matter of raising funds to defray the costs, would rest with the town hall meeting.
The hired specialists would have no authority other than that necessary for the performance of their contractual duties; coercive power, which is the essence of political authority, would be exercised, when necessary, by the committee of the whole.
When we trace social friction to its source do we not find that it seminates in a feeling of unwarranted hurt or injustice? Now, when one may take by law that which another man has put his labor into, we have injustice of the keenest kind, for the denial of a man’s right to possess and enjoy what he produces is akin to a denial of life.
Yet the confiscation of property is the first business of government. It is indeed its only business, for the government has no competence for anything else. It cannot produce a single “good” and so must resort to doing the only thing within its province: to take what the producers produce and distribute it, minus what it takes for itself.
This is done by law, and the injustice is keenly felt (even though we become adjusted to it), and thus we have friction. Remove the laws by which the pro- ducer is deprived of his product and order will prevail.
This is not, however, an indictment of our election system. It is rather a rejection of the institution of the State; our election system is merely one way of adjusting ourselves to that institution
The State is a product of conquest. As far back as we have any knowledge of the beginnings of this institution, it originated when a band of freebooting nomads swooped down on some peaceful group of agriculturists and picked up a number of slaves; slavery is the first form of economic exploitation. Repeated visitations of this sort left the victims breathless, if not lifeless and propertyless to boot.
So, as people do when they have no other choice, they made a compromise with necessity; the peaceful communities hired one set of marauders to protect them from other thieving bands, for a price. In time, this tribute was regular- ized and was called taxation.
The tax-gatherers settled down in the conquered communities, and though at first they were a people apart, time merged the two peoples—the conquerors and the conquered—into a nation. But, the system of taxation remained in force after it had lost its original character of tribute; lawyers and professors of economics, by deft circumlocution, turned tribute into “fiscal policy” and clothed it with social significance.
Nevertheless, the effect of this system is to divide the citizenry into two classes: payers and receivers. Among those who live without producing are those who are called “servants of the people” and as such receive popular support.
These further entrench themselves in their sinecures by setting up sub- tax-collecting allies who acquire a vested interest in the system; they grant these allies all sorts of privileges, such as franchises, tariffs, patents, subsidies and other some thing-for-nothing “rights.” This division of spoils between those who wield power and those whose economic advantages depend on it is succinctly described as “the State within the State.”
Thus, when we trace our political system to its origins we come to conquest.
But, so long as our system of taxation is in vogue, so long as the political means of acquiring economic goods is available, just so long will the spirit of conquest assert itself; for men always seek to satisfy their desires with the least effort.
It is interesting to speculate on the kind of campaigns and the type of candidates we would have if taxation were abolished and if, as a consequence, the power to dispense privileges was abolished. Who would run for office if “there were nothing in it?”
Why should any self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded on thievery? For that is what one does when one votes.
If it be argued that we must let bygones be bygones, see what can be done toward cleaning up the institution of the State so that it might be useful in the maintenance of orderly existence, the answer is that it cannot be done; you cannot clean up a brothel and yet leave the business intact. We have been voting for one “good government” after another, and what have we got?
To effectuate the suggested revolution all that is necessary is for citizens to stay away from the polls. Unlike other revolutions, this one calls for no organization, no violence, no war fund, no leader to sell it out. In the quiet of his conscience each citizen pledges himself, to himself, not to give support to an immoral institution, and on election day stays home, or goes fishing. That’s all. I started my revolution fifty years ago and the country is none the worse for it; neither am I.
A FEW YEARS after I got out of college I accidentally met up with Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. I had heard about the book but knew nothing of its content, so that when I picked it off a friend’s shelf and read the intro- duction, while he was shaving, I had no idea of what I was in for…
I read the book several times, and each time I felt myself slipping into a cause.… Some young men make a cause of their careers, some of their religion, some of fraternal organizations, and some are attracted to an utopianism. Among the latter are the socialists, the anarchists and the single taxers…
The subtitle of Progress and Poverty gives a clue to George’s utopianism: “An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase in want with the increase of wealth’…
Poverty, he insists, results not from maldistribution, but from the shortage of production; labor and capital are prevented by a quirk in our social arrangement from producing enough to go around. It is this deficiency in production that George addresses himself to.
All production, George points out, is the result of the application of labor, with the assistance of capital, to land; and land he defines as all the resources of nature. Nothing usable, nothing that caters to man’s desires, can be acquired in any other way. Therefore, the secret of production lies in the availability of land, particularly the land of greatest natural yield, or sites on which the greatest number of exchanges can be made….
… there is a scarcity of sites which because of their natural productivity or because of their nearness to markets yield most to the application of labor. This scarcity gives them value; the bidding by labor and capital for their use is expressed in rent.
But, the rent of these lands is not an expense that labor and capital must bear; it is merely a measure of their desirability, and is actually paid for by the greater productivity of these sites.
Thus, the rent of a desirable city site is not a charge against the services or merchandise produced thereon, is not added to the price of these goods or services, but is distributed in the number of transactions made possible by the nearness of this location to traffic, by its accessibility to buyers…
So far so well. However, under the private collection of this rent there is a tendency on the part of the owners to hold their sites out of use in anticipation of a higher capitalized rent than they can at present pay… This holding of land out of use for greater yields is called speculation, and it is this practice that holds down production. Since wages come out of production, this curtailment of output results in a lower wage level, which is the economic description of poverty.…
To abolish land speculation George would have the government collect the rent and use it for social services…. Rent would be sufficient to meet all the needs of government and, therefore, all taxes should be abolished.…
When George published his book, in 1879, there was no income taxation, and practically all taxes were levied on production. Taxes on production are passed on to the consumer, in the prices of commodities, and bear most heavily on those least able to meet the expenses of government. He would therefore abolish them and substitute a heavy tax on land values (or capitalized rent), heavy enough to discourage speculation. This proposal got the name of the “single tax,” a term he rarely used; he was for the abolition of taxes and the collection of land rent in lieu thereof…
That, in a nutshell, is the “single tax:” the public collection of the rent of land in lieu of all taxes.
There is, however, one objection to the reform which even its opponents overlook and which its advocates are inclined to slur over. George assumed that the rent of land when collected by public officials would be used to defray the expense of maintaining services necessary for social living.
But what if they did not apply the rent fund in that way?
To such questions the advocates of the “single tax” reply that if the rent were not used on social services rent would decline and the government’s income would decline in proportion…. But, in that event, would not wages and interest decline along with the rent? And, in that case, the economic and social benefits of the “single tax” would disappear.
Besides, what are social services? The term is quite elastic, and could be used to include socialized medicine, loans to business, subsidies to various segments of society, foreign adventures, enlargement of the bureaucracy, and a host of other activities that prosper the politician at the expense of society. It has been estimated that the rent of land in this country far exceeds the income from taxes, and if this vast sum were put at the disposal of politicians it would be used with the same profligacy. To the aspiring politician, rent or taxes would be the same.
George himself met this argument, when it was put to him, with excusable naivete. In his day the State had not yet become the monstrous institution that it has, thanks to the income tax.…
And what is political authority? It is the right to compel people to do what they do not want to do or to refrain from doing what they want to do….
Now, political power is in exact ratio to the amount of money at the disposal of the politician. This is so because the programs he institutes all involve restraints on the people and must be enforced; they are not self-enforcing. And the enforcement agencies, the bureaucracy, must be paid. Now, whether the funds come from the collection of taxes or the collection of rent is immaterial…
Politics is by definition the art of compelling men to do what they are not inclined to do, or to refrain from doing what they want to do. It is the business of restraint.
In a primitive society, as in our frontier life, the use of restraint was entrusted to the individual; he carried a gun to secure his life and his property. In organized society, this duty is undertaken by government, and insofar as it does protect life and property its use of force is justified.
But, when government undertakes the use of its monopoly of coercion for other purposes, it becomes a trespasser; it becomes a trespasser simply because it is not equipped to do anything else than the protection of life and property; it has no other competence.
The sum and substance of its intervention in the economic affairs of men is to use its monopoly of coercion so as to deprive some people of their property in favor of another group, or, indeed, in favor of itself.
That is all it is capable of doing; coercion is not a factor of production, it is neither labor nor capital nor land, and has no place in the production or distribution of wealth. In short, government is a nonproducer.
Therefore, the only function it can perform in the economic field is that of a robber; it takes what it cannot produce. Under the circumstances, therefore, government intervention in economic affairs becomes organized robbery, and even though this is done for presumably eleemosynary purposes, it causes dissatisfaction among producers and, eventually, a loss of interest in production.
My fortuitous licking of the union — the famous Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America — made me something of a character in industrial circles and I was invited by the Harvard Graduate School of Business to lecture on the case. This was in 1923, a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when the intellectuals of the country were hoping for “something good” to come out of the “Russian experiment.”
In my talk, I pointed out that the Amalgamated was a Marxist union, bent on abolishing the wage system rather than effecting an improvement in the conditions of its members; this was a picture quite different from that presented a week earlier by Sidney Hillman, president of the union.
And though I cited from the constitution of the organization and gave instances of the ideological orientation of its leaders, my audience (consisting of young men preparing themselves to take over the management of industry) did not like my capitalistic point of view; their questions were hostile, as were the glances of the two professors present. Even in those early days, Harvard was leaning perceptibly toward Marxism.
The question he cannot forget is, “Whom am I writing for?” For, except in the case of a private diary, kept to refresh one’s memory or to indulge one’s nostalgia, all writing presupposes reading. The author, then, must consider the education, the mental capacity and the receptiveness of a particular readership.
When you write a letter to Aunt Jane you select ideas and shape your language to suit Aunt Jane, which is quite different from the ideas and language you put into an application for a job.
When you write for a wide audience you aim your shots at a composite person, a creature of your imagination, which must be quite unlike any one of your readers. You cannot possibly know the prejudices of all your readers, the emotionalisms that block their understanding, and cannot take them into consideration in framing your sentences; the best you can do is to appeal to their reason, their sense of logic, and rest your case.
There is another question the writer frequently puts to himself: “Why am I writing? If the answer is ”for money” then he has no problem except that of mastering the necessary skill…. The job is quite similar to shoemaking, running a grocery store or operating a bank. Success comes to those who serve the largest market.:w
But, if the writer answers his “why” with “because I have something to say” he starts with a premise that prejudices his purpose. Maybe nobody wants to hear what he has to say; maybe what he has to say is two steps ahead of the capacity of his expected audience or proves upsetting to their mental complacency.
Thus, what chance for publication in a law journal would a thesis have if it undertook to prove law to be a fraud and lawyers to be charlatans? The doctrinaire socialist could hardly stomach an argument for the free economy.
The writer who “has something to say” is under obligation, then, to write “for himself.” He must write his piece and hope for a readership. And he must pray that it will be large enough to at least pay the cost of printing and postage.
The fact of the matter is that the condition of the workers has so improved under a free economy that they do not relish any change, and the theoretical socialists, anxious for votes, have had to change their theory to suit their following.
So, what is socialism without Marx?
As a matter of necessity they are reduced to expediencies and have there- fore become mere politicians, not revolutionists. In every country the socialists have become office seekers, aiming to get hold of the reins of government by parliamentary methods, and for no other purpose than to enjoy the prerogatives and perquisites of office. Power for the sake of power is their current aim.
Well, how does one acquire power in a country ruled by popular suffrage?
By promising the electorate all their hearts desire and by being more profligate with promises than the opposition. Thus, socialism has become mere welfarism, and with welfarism comes control of the national economy. But, while Marxism aimed to control the economy for the purpose of destroying capitalism, modern socialism seems bent on controlling the economy for the sake of control…
In short, socialists everywhere have adopted the program of American “liberals.
Socialists are born, not made. (And so are individualists. ) In a way, the basic urge toward socialism is in all of us, since every one of us is inclined to impose our set of values on others; we seek to “improve” the other fellow up to our own particular standards.
But, most of us will try to “elevate” the other fellow and, meeting resistance, will give it up as a hopeless job. The socialist, however, has an intuitive urgency for power, power over other people, and proceeds to bolster this urgency with an ethic: he seeks power for a humanitarian purpose. He would “elevate” all mankind to his ideal.
Since the individual does not wish to be “elevated,” and lays claim to something called rights, the socialist undertakes to prove that the individual does not exist, that an amorphous thing called “society” is the only fact of reality, and proceeds to impose his set of values on this thing.
Having made this discovery — that society is something greater than the sum of its parts, with an intelligence and a spirit of its own — the socialist dons his shining armor and sets forth on a glorious adventure for its improvement. He works for the “social good” — which is what he wanted to do since first he became aware of his instinct.
I have never met a dedicated socialist who did not consider himself a leader — if not at the top of the revolution, then at least as commissar of toothpicks in the ninth ward. He is not a replaceable part of the thing called society, but was destined, at birth, to be a regulator of this thing. He is of the anointed.
He may come from a wealthy home, where all his training should incline him toward capitalism, or he may come from the slums. In point of fact, many of the leaders among the socialists, those who do most to advance the cause, are inheritors of great fortunes accumulated under capitalism….
Education merely supplies the words and ideas that fit in with the primordial inclination of the socialist. He will accept at face value all the theories, all the figures and charts supporting his preconceived notions, and will reject offhand any arguments or data that support the idea of individual freedom.
You cannot teach anybody anything that he does not in a real sense already know… On the other hand, give a course in classical economics, or teach a group the meaning of natural rights, and some, though they have absorbed all the words of freedom, will come away entirely unconvinced. Some emotional block- ing prevents the ideas from taking root.
And this is also true of all the collectivistic professors; they read all the books which the individualist holds most dear, but the reading leaves them cold to the ideas; they are collectivist because nature inclined them toward collectivism.
It is true that by far the majority of our educators are socialists. But this follows not from the fact that they were educated in the creed, but that most of those who go into the pedagogical business are by nature inclined toward it…. Since our educational system is largely dominated by government, and is therefore monopolistically controlled, it attracts those who favor that kind of control; that is, it has a lure for the socialistically minded….
One more bit of evidence to support my thesis that socialism is intuitive, not acquired, is my experience with exsocialists and ex-communists. I have known a number of them and, with one exception, though they had dropped theoretical socialism they were all for government intervention; even that one exception was for our undertaking a “preventive war” with Russia.
All of them were intellectually honest men and rejected Marx on the basis of evidence and the dictates of logic; all of them were revolted by the immoralities of Sovietism. Yet, they could not accept wholeheartedly the principals of laissez-faire economics, nor could they subscribe to the idea of negative government. They held to the notion that government ought to intervene in the market place, for the “social good’ that political power could be exercised for the benefit of mankind. They were socialists in spite of themselves. They gave the impression that if only they were in command, socialism would work out all right. Other doxies were heterodox, but theirs was orthodox….
I have seen welfarism introduced as a temporary measure, intended for relief of the masses during the depression, and have watched it grow into a permanent policy of the nation, so much so that even to question it is to draw down on oneself the opprobrious name of reactionary.
In twenty-five years it has come to pass that one out of every six Americans is the recipient of government handouts of some kind, and the number is growing. To be sure, the very beneficiaries of the system pay for what they are getting, in taxes and in inflation, and they pay in addition the cost of administrating the collection and distribution of the largess.
Of course, it has all been done by the democratic process, by voting into office men of a socialistic bent, and, democracy being what it is, the process of socializing the country cannot be stopped.
A people can vote themselves into slavery, though they cannot vote themselves out of it.
WHEN I WAS MARRIED, in 1909,1 earned eighteen dollars a week, and my wife managed to pay all the household bills and save a few dollars every week from this salary. But, then, as she reminded me no end of times, steak was eighteen cents a pound in those days. And I myself can remember making my midday meal on a mug of beer and a liberal “free lunch” sandwich for a nickel. While I earned more by the beginning of World War I, before Woodrow Wilson got us into it, the cost of living remained about constant and my wife indulged in certain luxuries.
It was only after our government had begun to print and sell the misnamed Liberty Bonds that my wife began to complain about the price of steak and other things. Her complaints continued to mount for fifty years, with increasing emphasis.
Much has been written about inflation, particularly about its causes, and, like many another evil to which we become accustomed, there are those who maintain that it is nothing to worry about; in fact, in recent years inflation has been extolled as desirable. Yet, it is nothing but legal counterfeiting.
It is sheer dishonesty, a bold-faced robbery of the thrifty, a surreptitious tax. If there is any need to prove that the interests of the government are not those of its citizens, inflation supplies that need.
High prices during a war are inevitable. That is because the military consumes a large part of production, which in turn is reduced by the fact that many producers are engaged in making war. Many of the workers who would be producing the things people want are put to producing the things of war, which do not satisfy human desires. Yet, these non-productive workers have, in spite of the war, certain desires that call for gratification — food, raiment and shelter, to say nothing of beer and entertainment — and are in possession of wages with which to pay for these scarce items.
A truly patriotic people would forego these gratifications willingly, and might work for wages that would buy them mere subsistence. That would hold prices down considerably. But, patriotism is something to talk about, a luxury of the spirit, for which one should not be expected to pay; during war, wages are actually forced up by the disparity of the demand for and the supply of labor. The increased wages then go to market to bid up the prices of the scarcities.
The government, having no other source of revenue, obtains the money with which to pay these workers by taxing the workers themselves, but not enough to meet the entire wage bill; that would be politically undesirable, meaning that the workers might show resentment over such a demand on their patriotism. So, the government makes up the deficit by borrowing from savers and giving them receipts for such borrowingsM. The receipts, or bondsk, have a due date some time in the future, and, in addition, bear interest.
It is said that the bonds help to pay the cost of war. But, this is not so.
The war is paid for with the things that are produced during the war. The food the soldiers eat is grown and processed as they fight, and the shells they shoot are likewise made while the war is in progress. In short, the war is paid for out of current production. There is no way to shoot shells that will not be produced in twenty years, nor to eat bread that will not be baked until long after the war is over. We pay as we fight.
What, then, are the bonds for?
They are merely claims on future production, issued to the owners of the things used up in the war, and which they would not give up even to save the country from defeat without this compensation.
The government takes what it needs to prosecute the war —that’s the only way—and hands over these interest bearing receipts as a sop to patriotism. If it did not offer these claims on future production in exchange for what it needs of the current production to carry on the war, well, the resentment might cause the war to be called off; patriotism that isn’t paid for might be diluted.
The disparity between the cost of living and wages in this country was seriously felt after we got into the war, and was accentuated by the issuance of the Liberty Bonds. Incidentally, the bonds sold so well not because of the patriotic fervor of the buyers but because the prospect of receiving interest payments was assured by the fact of the income tax, which had become law only a few years before the advent of war.
When the Civil War broke out, Lincoln tried to raise five millions of dollars through a bond issue that bore a twelve percent interest rate, and only about two-thirds of this issue was taken up; that was because he lacked an income tax or any tax measure that would assure the bondholders of receiving the promised interest.
Woodrow Wilson, however, was under no such handicap; the income tax amendment was put into the Constitution during his first year in office.
Now, bonds become money. In fact, the imprint of the government of the United States makes them money as soon as issued, for that alone gives them purchasing power. True, it is hard to buy a penny newspaper—a penny was the price of a newspaper in those days—with a hundred dollar bond; but one can borrow from the bank plenty of pennies with the bond.
The proceeds from the sale of bonds were used by the government to pay for war materiel at prices figured on the then value of the dollar; that is, on the value established before the dollar depreciated as a result of the issuance of bonds,
It was only after the bonds got around, were turned into cash, that a swindle was discovered; the very infusion of this new money into the economy reduced the value of all the money in existence, meaning that the cost of living had risen.
I remember that within a year after the conclusion of the war I was forced to cash in my hundred dollar Liberty Bonds to meet some pressing expenses and had to sell them at a twenty percent discount. Those who held their bonds until maturity got even less, for by that time the purchasing power of the dollar had further depreciated, and though they got from the government the face value of their bonds, plus interest, the proceeds fetched them far less in goods than they would have received for the dollars they had put into these bonds. That I call a swindle.
There are those who equate inflation with high prices. That is like maintaining that the wet streets caused the rain to fall.
Prices may be high because of an increase of demand for certain commodities, or a decrease in the supply with demand remaining constant. Or they may reflect an increase in wages effected by the unions utilizing their monopoly powers. But, high prices due to increased demand can only be temporary, until suppliers, attracted by the high prices, are able to meet the demand with either the scarce article or with a satisfactory substitute. The same is true where the supply is diminished, as in the case of a crop failure…
But, the high prices caused by the infusion of new money into the economy is something else again; so long as the money remains in existence and in circulation, there is no way of bringing them down. For, everybody has a lot of money and everybody bids accordingly for the goods in the market place. Demand remaining, the high prices caused by inflation cannot be brought down.
Only the government can cause inflation, for only the government has the privilege of printing money; any private citizen trying it is courting a jail sentence.
Perhaps the greatest monetary swindle in this country was perpetrated by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he abolished the gold standard in 1933.
Now, there is nothing sacred about gold or a gold standard. But for several thousand years the metal has been universally used as a measure of value, and all peoples everywhere have shown a willingness to accept it in exchange for the goods or services they have to offer.
It is this confidence in the exchangeability of gold, a confidence that dates back to the days before governments monopolized the making of money, that found expression in the gold standard; the government’s paper money, certainly more convenient than metal money, was accepted on the condition that the holder could exchange the paper for gold.
A relationship between the amount of gold in the government’s possession and the amount of paper money it could issue was set up. This was a restraint on the printing presses. If the politicians went in for a spending spree and authorized the printing of dollar bills (counterfeiting) with which to defray the costs, the people could detect the fraud and take measures to stop it; for the holders of the dollar bills, realizing that these bills no longer fetched them the same amount of goods and services as they did before the fraud was perpetrated, could demand gold for the paper. Thus the government’s hands were shackled.
It was this restraint on his proposed profligacy that Mr. Roosevelt removed by abolishing the gold standard.
By making the possession of gold a criminal act, he removed the possibility of the individual holder to demand gold in exchange for government paper, and thus opened the way for the printing of almost as much paper as he needed to pay for all his ventures in socialism.
Nevertheless, this inflationary hocus-pocus helped to reelect Mr. Roosevelt three additional times. He used this bogus money to “enrich” large segments of the electorate who, thankful for this largess, reciprocated by casting their ballots for him. Although the manipulation was done in the name of humanity under the pseudonym of “social security,” it was in fact a way of buying votes. And this has remained standard political practice since the departure of Mr. Roosevelt…
Yet one cannot account inflation dishonest unless one assumes that the political mind is normal and that political behavior is bound by the moral code that applies to ordinary people. Such is not the case.
The fact is that the political mind is sui generis and operates along lines that are indigenous to the business of politics. Just as there is a criminal mind so there is a political mind; neither is normal and, therefore, both must be considered pathological.…
But, it is certain that once a man gets into politics his mind works along obscure ways, none of which fit the ordinary concepts of sanity or probity…
Similarities between the criminal and the political mind can be adduced aplenty. The bank robber who, when asked why he robbed banks, said “because that is where the money is,” showed the same degree of sagacity as does the congressman who puts a relative on the public payroll, or who wangles a government contract for a business in which he has an interest; both the bank robber and the congressman get where the getting is good.
A YOUNG FELLOW has to have a “cause.” Utopianism is as natural a disease for the boy of college age as was measles in his childhood. My malady was anarchism. I don’t know whether I took to Kropotkin and Prudhon because they furnished me with arguments with which to refute the socialists on the campus or because they wrote much about. At any rate, I experienced a violent love affair with anarchism, which was terminated only when I looked into the economic doctrines of the various schools of anarchism then extant.
All of them took a dim view of the institution of private property, without which, it seemed to me even then, individualism was meaningless.
If a man cannot enjoy the fruits of his labor, without let or hindrance, he is enslaved to the one who appropriates his property; a slave has no property rights.
Besides, I reasoned, the abolition of private property could be accomplished only by the intervention of an all-powerful State, which the anarchists were so bent on destroying. This incongruity curbed my short-lived passion for anarchism….
At an early age I developed a distaste toward “doing something about it”—that is, toward organizational and forceful reorienting of society into an image of my own making. I have never been a dues-paying, card-carrying member of any organization, am revolted by any attempt to channel my thinking, and am constitutionally opposed to political action.
I should, of course, like to see society organized so that the individual would be free to carry on his “pursuit of happiness” as he sees fit and in accordance with his own capacities. That is because I assume that the individual is endowed at birth with the right to do so. I cannot deny that right to my fellow man without implying that I do not have that right for myself, and that I will not admit. I claim for myself the prerogative of getting drunk and sleeping off my condition in the gutter, provided, of course, I do not interfere with my neighbor’s right to go to the opera; that is my, and his, way of pursuing happiness. How can a third person know that getting drunk or going to the opera is not “good” for either of us?
This I consider bad, wicked, dastardly, and all that. So, I undertake to “do something about it.” But, how? Obviously I cannot do anything about changing our tax system all by myself, although I can, if I am so minded, refuse to pay taxes and suffer the consequences; the consequences are a further interference with my pursuit of happiness. My one recourse is to associate myself with like-minded people and hope that we may somehow remove from our statute books the tax laws.…
And I meet up with conditions and interests that make the changing of law difficult. I find, for instance, that powerful groups have a vested interest in taxation; the veterans are for it and so are the farmers living on subsidies, as are the industrialists whose operations are geared to government income, while the owners of government bonds are most vociferous in opposing my idea.
I soon learn that politics is the art of the possible, and it is simply impossible to change the tax structure of the country...
The case of Robespierre comes to mind. He was, as everybody knows, a student and disciple of Rousseau, who was dead set against capital punishment. Yet, when it came to voting on the question of regicide, Robespierre cast his ballot in favor of it, accompanying his vote with a long explanatory speech in which he used another aberration of Rousseau—the General Will—to justify himself. Expediency impelled him to turn Rousseau inside out.
The weakness of the State lies in the fact that it is but an aggregate of humans; its strength derives from the general ignorance of this truism.
From earliest times the covering up of this vulnerability has engaged the ingenuity of the politician; all manner of argument has been adduced to give the State a suprahuman character, and rituals without endhave been invented to give this fiction the verisimilitude of reality….
The State is a person, or a number of persons, who exercise force, or the threat of it, to cause others to do what they otherwise would not do, or to refrain from satisfying a desire.
The substance of the State is political power, and political power is coercion exercised by persons on persons; the suprahuman character assumed by the State is intended to hide this fact and to induce subservience.
The strength of the State is Samsonian, and can be shorn off by popular recognition of the fact that it is only a Tom, a Dick and a Harry.
The anarchists say the State is evil. They are wrong. The State are evil. It is not a system that creates privilege, it is a number of morally responsible people who do so. A robot cannot declare war and a general staff cannot conduct one; the motivating instrument is a man called a king or a president, a man called a legislator, a man called a general. In thus identifying political behavior with persons, we prevent the transference of guilt to an amoral fiction; we place responsibility where it rightly belongs.
Having fixed in our minds the fact that the State consists of a number of people who are up to no good, we should proceed to treat them accordingly. You do not genuflect before an ordinary loafer; why should you pay homage to a bureaucrat?
If a prominent politician hires a hall to make a speech, stay away; the absent audience will bring him to a realization of his nothingness. The speeches and the written statements of a political figure are designed to impress you with his importance, and if you do not listen to the one or read the other you will not be influenced and he will give up the effort.
It is the applause, the adulation we accord political personages that registers our regard for the power they wield; the deflation of that power is in proportion to our disregard of these personages. Without a cheering crowd there is no parade.
Social ostracism alone can bring down the top layer of political skullduggery to its moral level. Those whose selfrespect has not dropped to the vanishing point will get out of the business and put themselves to honest work, while the degenerates who remain will have to get along on what they can pick up from a reluctant public…
The dais on which the judge sits elevates the body but lowers the man, and a jury box is a place where three-dollar-a-day slaves enforce the laws of slavery. You honor the tax-dodger and pay your respects to the man honorable enough to defy the law.
Social power resides in every individual. Just as you put personal responsibility on political behavior, so must you assume personal responsibility for social behavior. You think poorly of legislator Brown not because he has violated a tenet of the Tax Reform Society, to which you belong, but because his voting for a tax levy is in your estimation an act of robbery.
It is not a peace society that passes judgment on the war maker, it is the individual pacifist. All values are personal. The good society you envision by the decline of the State is a society of which you are an integral part; your campaign is therefore a personal obligation.
You are ineffective alone? You need an organization to help you? Only individuals think, feel and act; the organization serves only as a mask for those unable to think or unwilling to act on their own convictions…
When you speak for yourself you are strong. The potency of social power is in proportion to the number who are of like mind, but that is a matter of education, not organization.
So, let’s try social ostracism of politics and politicians. It should work. Reform through politics only strengthens the State
The spirit of pacifism was reinforced by a resurgence of American isolationism, the feeling that nothing good could come to us from interfering in European internal matters, and that we would be better off minding our own business.
It was this inbred isolationism that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt when he set out to get us into World War II, and from which he was fortuitously delivered by Pearl Harbor.
Since then, isolationism has been turned (by our politicians, our bureaucracy and their henchmen, the professorial idealists) into a bad word.
And yet, isolationism is inherent in the human make-up. It is in the nature of the human being to be interested first, in himself, and secondly, in his neighbors. His primary concern is with his bread-and-butter problems, to begin with, and then in the other things that living implies: his health, his pleasures, the education of his children, wiping out the mortgage on the old homestead and getting along with his neighbors…
That is to say, interventionism is a fad stimulated by the public press and, like a fad, has no real substance behind it. If a poll were to be taken on the subject, should we go to war, the probability is that very few would vote for the proposition; yet, war is the ultimate of interventionism, and the opposition to it is proof enough that we are isolationist in our sympathies.
A poll on the subject of isolationism—something like “do you believe we ought to keep out of the politics of other nations and ought to let them work out their problems without our interference?”—might bring out some interesting conclusions; but the politicians and the energumens of interventionism would prefer not to conduct such a poll. Our “foreign aid” program has never been subjected to a plebiscite.
The “foreign aid” program is another example of how the State grows and becomes more powerful at the expense of the People.
On Jan 20, 2025 President Trump signed an Executive Order that called for a 90-day pause on new foreign-aid programs. A few examples of what the “public press” had to say abut it:
“Chaos and confusion began to spread through the ranks of USAID, both in Washington, D.C, where there are about 15,000 employees and abroad, where there are thousands more.” (CNN) [15,000 employees and thousands more(!)]
“The officials say the groups must freeze nearly all programs that have received any of the $70 billion of annual aid budget approved by Congress through bipartisan negotiations” (NYT [$70 billion(!) a year. Where does the money come from? From the American tax payers.]
“Abby Maxman, head of Oxfam America, said: ‘By suspending foreign development assistance, the Trump administration is threatening the lives and futures of communities in crisis, and abandoning the United States’ long-held bipartisan approach to foreign assistance which supports people based on need, regardless of politics.’” (INDEPENDENT)
There is no right that allows you the luxury to feel compassion at the expense of others. You don’t have the right to support some people by seizing by force the property of others (i.e. money via taxation). Help must be voluntary. If you want to help people in need, use your own money.
Isolationism is not a political policy, it is a natural attitude of a people. It is adjustment to the prevailing culture within a country, and a feeling of security within that adjustment. The traditions, the political and social institutions and the moral values that obtain seem good, the people do not wish them to be disturbed by peoples with other backgrounds and, what is more, they do not feel any call to impose their own customs and values on strangers.
This does not mean that they will not voluntarily borrow from other cultures nor that they will surround themselves with parochial walls.
When World War II got going in Europe and it became evident that Mr. Roosevelt was intent on getting us into it, a group of Americans organized the America First Committee for the purpose of arousing the native spirit of isola- tionism to the point of frustrating his intent…
One flaw in their program was a tendency toward protectionism; the anti-involvement became identified with “Buy American” slogans and with high tariffs; that is, with economic, rather than political, isolationism. Economic isolationism— tariffs, quotas, embargoes and general governmental interference with international trade—is an irritant that can well lead to war, or political interventionism.
To build a trade wall around a country is to invite reprisals, which in turn make for misunderstanding and mistrust. Besides, free trade carries with it an appreciation of the cultures of the trading countries, and a feeling of good will among the peoples engaged. Free trade is natural, protectionism is political.
Political duplicity and dishonesty reached the heights when these bonds were advertised as anti-inflationary. The prospective buyers were assured that their purchases would (a) help win the war, (b) make them a profit, and (c) avoid inflation; a strange appeal to their patriotism, their cupidity and their ignorance.
It is true that the “savings” bonds, which could not be sold or borrowed upon, would delay their inflationary effect. But, when the government redeemed them, at the will of the holders or at maturity, and was unable to re-sell these bonds to “savers,” it would have to resort to borrowing from financial institutions, which would of course demand negotiable securities; these become inflationary.
This result could have been anticipated by anyone with a grain of sense; but, during the war this grain was missing and the bonds sold. They sold in spite of an article called, “Don’t Buy Bonds,” which I published at the time. And the fiscal irresponsibility which the Roosevelt administration practiced before we got into the war was accelerated; it hasn’t abated yet.
As isolationism is a natural attitude of the people, so interventionism is a conceit of the political leader.
THE ALACRITY with which the American people took to the multitude of interventions imposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, known collectively as The New Deal, simply emphasized the capacity of the human being to adjust himself to any conditions put upon him. So long as these conditions permit him to live.
Within a year after he had got into office Mr. Roosevelt had obliterated the American tradition of self-reliance and substituted for it a new value called “security”; and the people—including particularly those who pride themselves on their initiative, the business men —embraced this new value and all the restrictions that went with it.
There was hardly a voice raised against the establishment of a host of regulatory agencies and the laws that spawned them. Like a conqueror, he destroyed the tradition of freedom that had been three centuries in the making, and set up, as if by magic, a contrary manner of thought and life; and the people promptly adopted this new pattern, forgetting all that their history had taught them.
It occurred to me at the time that people are like cats. You take an alley cat into the house and pretty soon he appropriates for himself the best chair in the parlor. The adjustment is easy, and the cat resents any disturbance of it. Now, if circumstances compel the cat back to the alley he will pretty soon, under the compulsion to live, make a new adjustment to the garbage can, and will snarl when the garbage can is removed; he will snarl and act distrustfully even if you offer him a good meal and a good home.
But, it seemed to me, the cat is a cut above the American, because the latter did not snarl at the mess of pottage offered him by Mr. Roosevelt; he grabbed for it, utterly disregarding the noose of bondage that was surreptitiously slipped over his neck.
But, Mr. Roosevelt had in his arsenal a secret weapon which had not been available to politicians in the past: the income tax. With this instrument he could rob the people of their substance, dole out subsistence to those who needed it and bail out the speculators; values would be kept up at any cost, either in earnings or in human integrity,
That his program involved an accumulation of political power at the expense of social power did not even occur to the perplexed populace. They accepted the shift without question and settled down to live under the conditions of conquest. They seemed to like the garbage can.
It was a revolution, to be sure, for a revolution is nothing but a shift in power from one set of individuals to another; in this case, the shift was from the people to the political establishment. But, it was done without any apparent violence, effected with grandiose promises, a Harvard accent and a cigarette holder tilted at a studied angle.
What struck me at the time was the willing acceptance of conquest by the conquered. Overnight, as it were, they gave up their heritage. And then it occurred to me that in this fact lay a facet of human nature that reformers are wont to overlook; namely, that the will to live pushes us to an adjustment with any conditions that may be imposed on us, provided those conditions leave us with a meal and a mate.
Yet, I could not help thinking about this adjustment to the Rooseveltian revolution. History told me that the urgency to acquire power is inherent in the State, any State. The American State had been held in leash by its peculiar Constitution, adopted at a time when the people were conscious of this urgency and were intent to hold it within bounds. They were particularly aware of the fact that the power of the State is in proportion to its income, and made sure that the State would not go hog-wild by limiting its power to tax.
But, within a century new peoples with new ideas came upon the scene and this limitation was removed.
Under the slogan “soak the rich” the income tax was introduced into the law of the land. With this power to dip its hands into the earnings of producers the State would come into its own; that was inevitable.
So, psychology must take a look at political science, and ask: what is the preoccupation in the world that produces the mentality under question? The answer is obvious. That world revolves about the making and the enforcement of law; nothing else.
The ordinary citizen, who is considered normal simply because he is in the majority, lives within the law.
The criminal is concerned with the breaking of the law and lives outside it.
The politician is different in that his thought pattern is shaped behind the law.
It is in relation to the law that these three environments are distinguishable; the mental habits acquired in each environment are necessarily indigenous to it.
It is a certainty that all three categories of persons have one common denominator: the necessity of making a living.
For instance, we of the “normal” group declare that “honesty is the best policy.”
Thus, it may be said that the first “principle” of the criminal world is “to get away with it.”
What differentiates the world behind the law from the other two? Simply this, that is it concerned entirely with the acquisition of power over people, criminal or ordinary; its only business is the exercise of the monopoly of coercion which it enjoys…. we could describe it as a fixation: the highest “good” is regulation, control and domination. The “principle” evolving from this attitude is that the “law is supreme,” meaning that those who make and enforce the law are supreme….
In short, behind the law the pattern of thought is different from that which obtains in the “normal” world of lawabiding citizens, or the “abnormal” world of criminals. It may or may not be psychopathic, but it is different.
IN NEW YORK, in the fall of 1936 … I was introduced to Albert Jay Nock. I had read much of his writings, in his books and in the Old Freeman and was thoroughly in tune with many of his ideas, which he seemed to sense; we hit it off from the start, and until his death in 1945 we exchanged views and became as friendly as one could be with this reserved though companionable gentleman…
He was an intellectual hedonist, entirely superfluous to the utilitarian environment in which he lived…
Nock was an individualist, and he got that way not as the result of study but by force of temperament. As he would put it, the “furniture” of his mind was so arranged because no other arrangement would quite fit his mind.
A man thinks what he is, Nock would say, and no amount of education can make him think otherwise; the only function that education can perform is to give him the tools with which to bring out of him what “he already knows.”
He took to laissez faire economics, not because of its utilitarianism, but because of his abhorrence of political interventionism; even if the free market did not yield the greatest results, it was preferable to a regulated one
He was an anti-Statist because he revolted at the vulgarism of politics and its devotees; in his classic, Our Enemy the State, he likens the State to a “professional criminal class.”…
He was for letting people alone because only under a condition of freedom can they improve themselves, if there is any capacity for improvement in them…
While keeping as far as possible from the parade, he went his own way through life. In a crowd, if he happened to be in one, he was distinguishable only by his infinite capacity for listening. He was too considerate to refute any statement, even a palpably false one, and too self-respecting to get into controversy.
“Never complain, never explain, never argue,” he often said, “and you will get more fun out of life.”
His gift of parable was extraordinary… Those who are acquainted with his writings know how he could short-circuit a lot of logic-shopping by the use of an apt story; he spoke as he wrote. One night during the war, a group of superpatriots were expounding on the theory of the innate bestiality of the Germans and stressing the need of digging our national heel into the entire race.
Nock, as usual, said nothing. Finally, someone called for his opinion. He quietly allowed that he knew nothing of the subject under discussion, but begged leave to tell of an experience he had had in a small German town some years before the war. While waiting for the stationmaster to serve him, said Nock, he picked up an historical booklet about the town. It was written in alt hoch Deutsch, which is to modern German about what Chaucer is to modern English.
In due time the station master turned to Nock and asked him if he were an American. Assured that this was so, the man expressed astonishment, for he had never heard of an American scholar, let alone one who could negotiate ancient German. As a result of this chance incident, Nock was lionized during the few days he remained in the town. “In France or England,” concluded Nock, “I never heard of scholarship being so highly regarded.” There was no more talk of exterminating the German people.
Nock’s brand of individualism came out in full panoply when he discussed education, a subject in which he was keenly interested. He insisted that no fault could be found with modern education if the underlying principle of democracy were accepted as an axiom.
That principle holds that not only are we all equal under the law, but that we are also endowed with equal capacities. It follows, then, that we are all equally and perhaps indefinitely perfectible, given equal educational advantages. Public education for all is the way to the perfect society.
But, in point of fact, we find considerable differences in the intellectual capacities of individuals, and these differences make the application of the democratic principle difficult. Yet we are dedicated to the principle and cannot abandon or even modify it.
The best we can do under the circumstances is to fit the standard of education to the lowest common denominator, and to keep on lowering it as more and more are invited or forced into the school system.
It would be undemocratic to set the standard above the reach of the most unfortunate moron. Everybody can be trained to do something, and so education under the democratic principle had to become utilitarian…
Therefore, the goal of democratic education must be to fit the future citizenry for some trade or profession, and courses in carpentry or domestic science have become more important in the curriculum than courses in Latin or logic.
But, where does that leave the mind that is capable of learning?
In the Grand Tradition, said Nock, education was geared to that mind only; the standard was set for it, and if one could not reach the heights, one was not educable and that was the end of it. Though he did not belong to the select circle, he could be a very useful citizen and lead a very happy life. In a material way, indeed, the non-educable were likely to have the advantage over the others; Spinoza, a highly educated man, earned his modest living as a lens grinder.
The object of education in the Grand Tradition was not to train technicians but to pick out of the ruck those who were endowed with questing minds. It was quite undemocratic, to be sure, in that it took cognizance of an intellectual elite. For that minority breed the democratic system has no place, and anyone suffering from intellectual curiosity is compelled to get his education in any way that he can find outside that system. This theory of the educable elite is of the essence of Nock’s individualism.
An evening with Nock on education was a stimulating experience, especially since the conversation was embellished with anecdotes. But if you had any idea that Nock intended to “do anything about it” you were soon set straight. “Things are as they are and will be as they will be,” and events will take their course regardless of reformers.
The educable will get their education, despite democracy, simply because they are educable. Any attempt to change the democratic educational system is both presumptuous and hopeless.
“Why, then,” I asked him as he was setting out on a lecture tour, “do you lecture? Why do you write? Why do you criticize when you have no alternative plan to offer?” His reply: “A fellow does what he has to do.”
He held that there is a basic difference between government and the State, and it is a mistake to use the words interchangeably.
The one is an institution arising from the needs of society; its function is to protect the individual in the enjoyment of the rights that inhere in him by virtue of his existence; its only business is the administration of justice.
On the other hand, the State is an antisocial organization, originating in conquest and concerned only with the confiscation of property.
The State began with the practice of nomadic tribes swooping down on some agricultural community, confiscating the movable wealth and, after slaying the less productive inhabitants, carrying off to slavery a number of others. Slavery is the first institution of the State.
Later on, the raiding tribesmen, sometimes by invitation, would settle down among the producers as “protectors” and administrators, collecting tribute for their pains. Sometimes a merger between invaders and their subjects would take place, even by marriage, and a nation was born; but the instruments of confiscation were continued, and those who inherited them became the State.
This is, in a way, an economic theory of political institutions. There are two ways of making a living, Nock explained. One is the economic means, the other is the political means.
The first consists of the application of labor to raw materials so as to bring into existence things people want, the second is the confiscation of the rightful property of others.
The State is that group of people who having got hold of the machinery of compulsion, legally or otherwise, use it to better their circumstances; that is, by use of the political means.
State consists not only of politicians, but also of those who make use of the politicians to further their own ends; that would include those we call pressure groups, lobbylists and all those who wangle special privileges from the politicians. All the injustices that plague “advanced” societies, he maintained, are traceable to the workings of the State organizations that attach themselves to these societies.
This differentiation between State and government was set down formally in his Our Enemy the State, which originated in a series of lectures to a class in advanced history he gave at Columbia University. (Incidentally, he refused the offer of a professorship at this institution because he did not think he could “punch a clock’)
In private conversation he would enrich the theory with historical anecdotes and with references to living persons which could hardly be put in print. The book handles the subject of the development of the American State rather gingerly; in conversation he could be more blunt.
To sum up, Nock was an unique individual, both in his ideas and in his comportment. In the best sense of the word, he was civilized; knowledgeable but never pedantic, reserved but companionable, cosmopolitan in his tastes and, above all, a gentleman to whom it never occurred to inflict hurt on any man.
He avoided the mass-mind, not only because he thought it most uninteresting, but because he thought nothing could be done to improve it.
If there was to be any improvement in society it would have to come by way of self-improvement of the individuals who compose it. So, Nock put in a lifetime bettering Nock, and since he had chosen writing as a profession he concentrated on polishing his style to the point where it became the envy of his contemporaries.
Henry L. Mencken once said to him: “Nobody gives a damn what you write; it’s how you write that interests everybody.” That is about the highest compliment one craftsman could pay another. But, it was not exactly true. What Nock said was as interesting as the way he said it.
IN THE INTEREST of science fiction, I offer herewith, free gratis, and with no strings attached, the makings of a novel, one that could well make the best seller list and might even be a good book. The fictioneer would have to bring to my idea a reasonable knowledge of the social, rather than the natural, sciences; that is, he must know something about economics, political science and what makes the human tick. If he can dip his imaginative brush into these pigments he could come up with a canvas rivaling Orwell’s famous “1984.”…
The genius of the fictioneer would be demonstrated by his ability to make this hypothesis believable: that America, the land that for over three centuries was the land of the immigrant, had become the land from which the sons of that immigrant were fleeing, and that the point of attraction for them had become, of all places, Russia….
However, I would suggest that he put his prognostication far enough into the future, say 2084, so that if he should go wrong in his estimates he will not be around to suffer the brickbats….
If only some method of distributing the multiplying wealth could be devised, the inequity would be righted and all would have plenty. Leaders, particularly those with pretensions to intellectuality, not only phrased the thought born of covetousness, but also devised a grandiose scheme of redistribution. That was the Sixteenth Amendment.
This change in the charter of government, as later events showed, really revised the whole thing. By giving the government a first lien on the earnings of the people it undermined the sanctity of private property, which was the keystone of the liberty the immigrants cherished.
It was a transference of economic power from the producers to politicians
Those who framed the Constitution had been fully aware of the consequence, that political power is determined by economic power, and were careful to guard against it; but their great-grandsons, overcome by the something-for-nothing mirage, lost sight of the danger.
The shift in power in time undermined the moral fiber of the producers. For, as the inherent avidity of government asserted itself in constantly increasing levies on income, the producers as a matter of necessity began looking to it for succor and for the solution of all life’s problems. Self-reliance was submerged in the demand, as a “right,” for economic security, for government support and management of the economy by way of subsidies, loans, contracts and jobs. Dependence on the State became a virtue; dependence on oneself was derided as “rugged individualism.”…
Moral decadence shows itself only in retrospect, long after the corrosion has taken place. And so, Americans drifted along for many years, oblivious of the fact that their country, conceived in freedom, was going the way of other nations which had turned from personal responsibility to Statism. (Up to this point the novelist is dealing with the documented past. The challenge to his imaginative faculty and his knowledge of social and political behavior starts with war in the making.)
IN 1800 the United States Treasury owed $83 million. The population was then three million. Every baby born that year was loaded down with a debt-burden of about $28; if the interest rate was 6%, the new-born citizen could look forward to paying a service charge on the national debt of $1.68 per year.
Today the debt-load of the nation comes to well over $290 billion, and the population is, in round figures, 180 million. Thus, while the population has increased by 60 times, the national debt has increased by 3600 times; and figuring the interest rate at 4%, the cost of handling this debt is, roughly, $68 per citizen per year. The child is now loaded down at birth with a debt-load of $1700. . . .
These figures might be adjusted to the increased production per citizen, and to the decreased value of the dollar. Even so, the fact sticks out that posterity does not pay off anything of the national debt, that each administration adds to the debt left to it, and that the promise.
The bulk of the rise in the national debt has occurred since 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt abolished the gold standard and thus made money redeemable in—money.
When money was redeemable in gold, the inherent profligacy of government was somewhat restrained; for, if the citizen lost faith in his money, or his bond, he could demand gold in exchange, and since the government did not have enough gold on hand to meet the demand, it had to curtail its spending proclivity accordingly.
But, Mr. Roosevelt removed this shackle and thus opened the floodgates. The only limit to the inclination of every politician to spend money, in order to acquire power, is the refusal of the public to lend its money to tie government. Of course, the government can then resort to printing money, to make money out of nothing, but at least the people will not be compounding the swindle. Therefore, I offer the following gratuitous advice:
Don’t buy bonds.
The advice is based on purely moral, not fiscal, grounds. I could point out that when the government issues a bond it is diluting the value of all the money in existence. Every bond is, in effect, money: the fact that the indenture bears the seal and imprint of the government makes it so, even though it may not enter the market place as money; it does not become monetized for some time.
That is, every bond issued by the government is inflationary, and thus robs the savers of the value of their savings. That, of course, is a swindle and is immoral. But, the immorality of bonds runs much deeper.
In the first place, when the State spends more money then it receives in taxes—a fact indelibly written into the bond —it is deliberately committing an act of bankruptcy. If your neighbor should do that you would promptly put him down as a dishonest person. Is the dishonesty transmuted into its opposite when committed by a legal entity? By what multiplier can robbery be made a virtue? The act of borrowing against imaginary income is a fraud, no matter who does it, and when you make a loan to that borrower you aid and abet a fraud.
The State’s excuse for borrowing is that it invests the proceeds of its bonds for the benefit of posterity. Instead of putting the entire burden of meeting the cost of its beneficial acts on the living it proposes to demand of unborn children their share of the cost. Quite plausible! But is this not the impossible doctrine of control of the living by the dead?
What would you think of a prospective father who deliberately put a debt load on his expected offspring? That is exactly what you do when you cooperate with the State’s borrowing program.
You are loading on your children and your children’s children an obligation to pay for something they had no voice in, and for which they may not care at all. Your investment-for-posterity may earn you nothing but the curses of posterity.
The use of the word “investment” in connection with a bond issued by the State is a treacherous euphemism.
When you buy an industrial bond you lend your money to a corporation so that it can buy a machine with which to increase its output of things wanted by the market. The interest paid you is part of the increased production made possible by your loan. That is an investment.
The State, however, does not put your money into production. The State spends it— that is all the State is capable of doing—and your savings disappear. The interest you get comes out of the tax-fund, to which you contribute your share, and your share is increased by the cost of servicing your bond. In effect, you are paying yourself. Is that an investment?….
What, then, becomes of the national debt? It grows and grows until, like a balloon, it bursts. But, though this is inevitable, thanks to the money-making monopoly of the State, it takes a long time before the balloon does burst, and certain conditions must prevail to cause the explosion….
When the burden of meeting the service charges becomes economically unbearable, and the State’s credit is gone, repudiation or inflation is re- sorted to.
Of these two methods, repudiation is by far the more honest. It is a straightforward statement of fact: the State declares its inability to pay. The wiping out of the debt, furthermore, can have a salutory effect on the economy of the country, since the lessening of the tax-burden leaves the citizenry more to do with. The market place becomes to that extent healthier and more vigorous. The losers in this operation are the few who hold the bonds, but since they too are members of society they must in the long run benefit by the improvement of the general economy; they lose as tax-collectors, they gain as producers.
Repudiation commends itself also because it weakens faith in the State. Until the act is forgotten by subsequent generations, the State’s promises find few believers; its credit is shattered.…
Anyhow, since honesty and politics are contradictory terms, the State’s standard method of meeting its debt obligations is inflation.
It pays off with engraved paper. To be sure, even as it issues its new I.O.U.s to pay off its defaulted ones, the inflationary process is on, for every bond is in fact money; like money, it is a claim on production. is in fact money; like money, it is a claim on production.
The bond you buy increases the circulatory medium, thus depressing its value, and you are really exchanging good money for bad. You are cheating yourself. That is demonstrable by comparing the purchasing power of the dollar at the time you bought the bond with its purchasing power at maturity...
But, how about the natural pull of patriotism? In the face of national danger, is it not right that we put our all into the common defense? Of course it is right; and people being what they are, the pooling of interests is spontaneous when community life is threatened, as in the case of a flood, an earthquake or a conflagration, or when the Indians attacked the stockade.
In such catastrophes we give, we do not lend. Patriotism weighted with profit is of a dubious kind.
Bonds do not fight wars. The instruments and materials of war are forged by living labor using the existing stock of capital; the expense must be met with current production. The bonds are issued because laborers and capitalists are reluctant to give their output for the common cause; they put a greater value on their property than on victory. Were confiscatory taxation the only means of carrying on the war its popularity might wane; the war would have to be called off.
This specious resort to spurious patriotism reaches its ultimate in the textbook justification for the public debt. It runs something like this: citizens who have a financial stake in the State, by way of bonds, take a livelier interest in its doings. Thus, love of country is made contingent on the probability of returns, both as to capital and to booty. This smacks of the kind of patriotism which motivated the moneybrokers of the Middle Ages; once they invested in their king’s ventures they could not afford to become lukewarm in their fealty.
It is not patriotism that is engendered by the borrowing State. It is subservience.
With its portfolio chock-full of bonds, the financial institution becomes in effect a junior partner whose self-interest compels compliance. An allotment of bonds to a bank carries force because its current large holdings might lose value if doubt were thrown on the credit of the State. A precipitate drop in the prices of federal issues would shake Wall Street out of its boots; hence new issues must be taken up to protect old issues. The concern of heavily endowed universities in their holdings of bonds is such that professorial doubt of their moral content could hardly be tolerated. Even the pacifist minister of a rich church would have to be circumspect in voicing his opinion of the public debt. That is, the self-interest of the tax-collecting bondholders, not patriotism, impels support of the State.
Taken all in all, the bond is a thoroughly immoral institution. I would not be caught dead with one of these papers on me.
The dogma that the State or government is the embodiment of all that is good and beneficial and that the individ>uals are wretched underlings, intent on inflicting harm on one another and badly in need of a guardian, is almost un- challenged. It is taboo to question it in the slightest way. He who proclaims the goodness of the State and the infallibility of its priests, the bureaucrats, is considered an impartial student of the social sciences. All those raising objections are branded as biased and narrow-minded. The supporters of the new religion of statolatry are even more fanatical and intol- erant than were the Mohammedan conquerors of Africa and Spain . .. LUDWIG VON MISES in Planned Chaos.
Communism is the religion of Power. To be sure, it has a rationale and even an ethic; but so had Pharaohism, Caesarism, the Inquisition and all the machines of coercion ever invented by man. It is necessary for those who compel subservience to clear their road with a moral code of some kind. In such a religion the self-restraints of “bourgeois morality” have no place, while heretical indeed is the doctrine of nonmaterialistic, superpersonal ideals. Being the only true religion it cannot permit competition from any other “opium.” Power is god enough.
Communism did not come, as Marx predicted, as the inevitable replacement of a collapsed capitalism. It came because of improvements in the techniques of grabbing power: the machine gun, the radio, the airplane, and, above all, the art of fiscal robbery. Lenin preached the glory of toughness, Stalin purged. Mussolini bettered Stalin’s fanfare with castor oil. Hitler added the racial gadget of repression. The “public good” was invoked by all three.
It remained for the Great Man in America to improve on their techniques by destroying the meaning of words, by so confusing language that instead of being a means of communicating ideas it became an instrument for compelling subservience.
Meanwhile, he dug up and polished the old Roman device of “bread and circuses.” Here was an apostle of Power whom the least bloodthirsty socialist could accept. No bludgeon in his equipment, but the skillful use of seductive phrases, so dear to the “intellectual,” gained for him the self-same means of compelling conformity which his crude European models sought: control of the economy. And with that control he built a hierarchy—a church. He anointed the frustrated soap-boxers and collegiate word-mongers with the scented oil of bureaucracy. He gave them jobs. He invested them with Power. That began in 1933.
And now we come to the spy-hunt, which is, in reality, a heresy trial.
What is it that perturbs the inquisitors? They do not ask the suspects: Do you believe in Power. Do you adhere to the idea that the individual exists only for the glory of the State?…. Are you against taxes, or would you raise them until they absorbed the entire output of the country? Do you favor more “social gains” under the aegis of the bureaucracy? Or would you advocate the dismantling of the public trough at which these bureaucrats feed? In short, do you deny Power?…
Power-worship is presently sectarianized along nationalistic lines. The hope of its devotees is a single ritual for all peoples, a centralized church, a universal hierarchy; only in that way can the vestiges of the heresy of freedom be eradicated. In the meantime each nation guards its orthodoxy.
Because the Russian people have long been inured to subjugation, the “church’* has made more progress there than anywhere else, and it is but natural that the more imaginative of the American bureaucracy should look to Moscow as the ideal. And it follows that some will plot the importation of its more thoroughgoing ritual to this country….
In this country, as the investigations have so amply shown, Communism thrived in proportion to the number of jobs provided by Congress at the taxpayers expense. As long as jobs are available there will be communists, either by infiltration or by incubation; the emoluments and the pomp which go with a political job will convert the meekest bureaucrat to the religion of Power. Hence, if Congress would destroy this creed, it would undo all the “social gains” which have been imposed on us since 1933. It must abolish the bureaus. If that were done, the devotees of Power would be reduced to soap-box oratory. That may be asking for a miracle.
From the story of Saul, who came to be known as Paul, we draw the lesson: that when people want freedom they will get it. When the desire of the business man for “free enterprise” is so strong that he will risk bankruptcy for it, he cannot be denied.
When youth prefers prison to the barracks, when a job in the bureaucracy is considered leprous, when the tax-collector is stamped a legalized thief, when handouts from the politician are contemptuously rejected, when work on a government project is considered degrading, when, in short, the State is recognized to be the enemy of society, then only will freedom come, and the citadel of Power collapse.
Considering the temper of the times the emergence of such a public state of mind would indeed be a miracle. But, in some degree it has happened before and therefore we may hope. When the organized religion of Power, known as Communism (more properly called Statism), shall have destroyed all values, and reduced the individual to a nonentity, will its overthrow by moral force be accomplished.
In degrading the individual it destroys itself, simply because the degraded individual loses interest in production and ceases to provide the wherewithal for the State. As the State rots away from malnutrition, the individual begins to reassert himself in something called Civil Disobedience, Passive Resistance, or some other kind of revolution, and the contest is all in his favor. Freedom comes when Caesar is no longer able to maintain his legions.
The answer to the first question—why does the electorate vote for the sons of rich men?—seems to lie in the deterioration of the Protestant Ethic and the rising popularity of what has been called the Freudian Ethic.
The Protestant Ethic, as has been noted, held that man is by nature a sturdy individual, self-reliant and responsible.
The Freudian Ethic says this is not so. Freud said that the individual comes into this world unwillingly and is biologically incapable of meeting its demands. The baby suffers a trauma at birth— by virtue of coming out of the warmth and comfort of the womb and being confronted with conflict—and suffers throughout life from neuroses. Society is to blame for all the sufferings of mankind.
The Freudians—those who have expanded the Freudian concept of the human character into an ideology—have undertaken, therefore, to alter society so as to make the path of the individual through life easier, more comfortable. The way to alter society to fit the Freudian pattern is through government action. This is called “social legislation,” which turns out to be handouts of tax money.
Therefore, if you want to know Thoreau you had better pass up the diagnosticians and get down to reading Thoreau himself. You will find him an “open book”—quite willing to tell you frankly, and interestingly, what he thought and why he lived the way he did. He is quite companionable.
Begin, then, with his essays: Civil Disobedience, Slavery In Massachusetts, John Brown, Life Without Principle. If you want more, and you will, go in for Walden—but you will have to read it slowly to get your money’s worth out of it and then put in an evening or two with the revealing extracts from his journals, or diaries as we call them.
Maybe you too will decide that Thoreau was “maladadjusted.” But you might withhold judgment until you define this pathological mouthful. Before the war, the boy who ran away from home and joined the army was “maladjusted”; during the war the boy who refused to join the army on principle was similarly labelled. The word, therefore, as used, simply means that the person so described is either incapable or unwilling to submit to the going herd-cult
It connotes some emotional or mental weakness, and carries a bit of condescension and of pity with it; that the ability and willingness to stand the crowd off may indicate exceptional self-reliance is overlooked.
Sometimes one cannot help suspecting that the perfectly “adjusted,” those who are quick to fit themselves into any thought-pattern prepared by the neighbors, find the term “maladjusted” a convenient covering up of their own weakness. Maybe the word is plain name-calling, pulled up out of the gutter by “science.” The suppressed rebel in us resents the courage of those who rebel openly…
A biography of Thoreau worth reading, because it concerns itself with revealing the man from his own point of view and not with the biographer’s estimate of him, was done by a Frenchman, Leon Bazelgette.
“The gods,” says Bazelgette, “have made a Henry who is all of a piece, and they have placed him on earth among objects and souls that are different and queer.” There you have it….
Even in his teens he displays that “militant devotion to various axioms that he identifies with himself.” He could not be cast into a mold; he was not made of that stuff. Harvard had facilities which he could use to improve himself. It was a means; the end was a better Thoreau.
It was not for the “old joke of a diploma” that he read enormously, far be- yond the requirements of the curriculum, though outside of it. At nineteen he wrote: “Learning is art’s creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it cannot educate.”…
A professor of economics once told me that the last word on the subject was pronounced by Henry George. “Do you teach him?” I asked. “No, he is not in the curriculum, and if I tried to teach Henry George it would be worth my job.’ Thoreau could not understand that kind of thinking. If flogging were part of the curriculum he would cut himself off from it. He valued Thoreau more than his job.
We talk a lot about freedom these days. When you dig to the bottom of this talk you realize that, first, very few know what freedom is and, secondly, still fewer want it.
The fact is that what is generally called freedom consists of increases in wages (or handouts), more profits (or subsidies) and a bottomless abundance of privileges. For such things we—particularly the more affluent among us—are ready to lay freedom on the line. The essence of freedom, which is an inflexible respect for oneself, is being bartered every day for such trifles.
Thoreau was not in that business. Once the dwindling fortunes of his father’s pencil factory needed looking into. Henry undertook the job and by careful application produced the best pencil in America. He made only one; but that was enough. As an honest workman he satisfied himself; as a good son he put his father in the way of a competence. Why should he sell himself for pencils? Profits were not among the axioms that he identified with H. D. Thoreau. Luxuries came too high if the price was freedom. Imagine our “captains of industry” passing up a profit or a privilege for the chance to be men!
Freedom is an individual experience. If you have it, its objective expression will find many forms; but if you don’t have it you will get along all right, like any four-footed animal or “sound” citizen, and you may even go to Heaven, but you can never be free.
Chattel-slavery was the issue in Thoreau’s time, just as state-slavery now is. A lot of people talked about the iniquity of the system. What did Thoreau do? He refused to pay the poll-tax on the ground that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would use the funds to capture and return fugitive slaves.
Now, when you refuse to pay taxes you are indeed a dangerous man, for you undermine the institution whereby some men live by the labor of others; therefore, you must be clapped into jail until you see the error of your ways and make your proper adjustment.
Of his one night spent behind bars Thoreau writes:
I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar . . . I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations. As they could not reach me they resolved to punish my body; just as boys, as they cannot come against some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was as timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons . . . I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
Such a man cannot be enslaved.
It need hardly be said that Thoreau would have no truck with institutions, organizations or “movements.” When freedom submits to a formula it rids itself of responsibilitythe responsibility to one’s own axioms.
To check one’s thought and behavior against the dictates of one’s conscience may prove unflattering; to chart one’s course by such a check-up requires a powerful will; it is to avoid such revelation and responsibility that people are prone to hide behind rituals, committees, flags and by-laws.
But, flight from individual responsibility amounts to abandonment of freedom. You are not free when you refuse to make choices in your own name. You enslave yourself when you take refuge from the consequences of your decisions in an organization, a nation or any collective fiction
To Thoreau such “escapism” was unthinkable, queer. So, he writes: “As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an organization grows up.” For him there never was a lull of truth.
The value you put on freedom is, like all objective value, the price you are willing to pay for it. Thoreau’s price came high, and the difference between him and his contemporaries is not to be found in the lingo of psychology but in the greater worth he put on his self-esteem. He rejected the mob because mingling with it called for a sacrifice of that self-esteem at the altars of convention and hypocrisy.
That he was not unsocial is evidenced by his friendship with people of similar timber and by devotion to his family. Whether it was with Emerson or the wood-cutter, with Channing or an Indian guide, his social contacts had to be on an above-board basis, unencumbered with trivialities; any other terms did not interest him….
He was determined to be free of rubbish. Once he was asked to sign a pledge, to which the names of the “best” people of Concord were attached, that he would treat all people as brothers. He declined to do so until he found out how other people would treat him. He was not going to be sociable for the sake of sociability; he demanded as much as he gave. He would neither accept nor bestow condescension.
He conquered his appetites in order to be free; he was not going to be a slave to things. His venture into the pencil business shows that he had the makings of a successful industrialist.
With a brother he operated a school that was the envy and chagrin of rival schoolmasters, not only because of its success but more so because of some advanced ideas of pedagogy which the brothers introduced.
As a surveyor he was in demand and highly respected, both for his accuracy (he made his own instruments) and for his integrity.
He might have made money also as a lecturer and a writer had he been willing to compromise his standards, for he was proficient in both fields. But, he was not willing to give up what the making of money costs: freedom.
For that reason he refused regular occupation of any kind—although he was never idle—and got himself the reputation of being a ne’er-do-well.
From his own point of view he was doing far better than his detractors, for while they got respectability for their industry and pains, he had self-respect.
The rock on which every attempt to rid man of his shackles is ultimately wrecked is man’s unwillingness to pay the price of freedom—the price which Thoreau cheerfully paid.
Every “cause” must crash on it. For, when the theorizing is done, the books are all written, the debates have been resolved into a formula for action, there remains always this irremovable obstacle: one must live.
By this dodge the lipservers simply admit that the worth they put on their ideal is less than that they put on their accustomed way of living or the prospect of improving it. The ideal is something nice to talk about, to use as a tonic for one’s sluggish intellectual liver, but when it comes to giving up something for it, that is a different matter. It is more pleasant to make one’s peace with the going order, right or wrong. And if someone pricks your conscience, you get rid of him by declaring that “the time is not ripe,” or by saying, “wait until I make my pile.”
Thoreau said that if he saw a reformer coming his way he would run for his life. He had no need for reform. s way he would run for his life. He had no need for reform. The man who identifies axioms with himself wants no preacher, while the preacher will have no influence with those who are constitutionally incapable of axioms. If the reformer justifies his calling on the ground that through education moral values that are lacking may be instilled, the answer is that all experience denies that possibility. Education can present choices; it cannot make decisions. No pedagogical system has ever succeeded in eliciting values which do not exist in the person.
Improving on Jefferson, Thoreau says: “That government is best which governs not at all;” then he wisely adds: “and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Will they ever be prepared for it?
The power of the State is in exact proportion to its taxincome. The police—the bureaucracy—have to be paid for their services, and the larger tax-income the greater will be the bureaucracy; in fact, the size of the bureaucracy can be used as a measure of State power.
The founding fathers were well aware of this phenomenon, and sought to limit the area of State intervention by putting strict limits on its taxing powers. But, all that was done away with when the income tax amendment was added to the Constitution.
Without income taxation, socialism is impossible; with it, socialism is inevitable.
Now, the “poor” pay most of the taxes. This is necessarily so, because the national payroll contains most of the wealth of the country and is therefore the most fruitful source of taxation. The State is not concerned with the welfare of the “poor”—or even of the “rich”—but takes where the getting is good; and the wages of the country is a cornucopia the State could not overlook.
So that those who have nothing but their labor to sell pay for the bounties handed to them, as well as for the administration of the handouts, although, to be sure, they believe (and are told) that they are getting something for nothing, that the “rich” pay all the taxes.
Capitalists, on the other hand, gain something by the privileges they enjoy. In the first place, there are loopholes in the tax laws which enable them to avoid paying taxes in proportion to their income….
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines taxation as “that part of the revenues of a state which is obtained by the compulsory dues and charges upon its subjects.”
That is about as concise and accurate as a definition can be; it leaves no room for argument as to what taxation is. In that statement of fact the word “compulsory” looms large, simply because of its ethical content. The quick reaction is to question the “right” of the State to this use of power. What sanction, in morals, does the State adduce for the taking of property? Is its exercise of sovereignty sufficient unto itself?
… those who hold to the primacy of the individual, whose very existence is his claim to inalienable rights, lean to the position that in the compulsory collection of dues and charges the State is merely exercising power, without regard to morals….
If we assume that the individual has an indisputable right to life, we must concede that he has a similar right to the enjoyment of the products of his labor.
This we call a property right. The absolute right to property follows from the original right to life because one without the other is meaningless; the means to life must be identified with life itself.
If the State has a prior right to the products of one’s labor, his right to existence is qualified. Aside from the fact that no such prior right can be established, except by declaring the State the author of all rights, our inclination (as shown in the effort to avoid paying taxes) is to reject this concept of priority
Our instinct is against it. We object to the taking of our property by organized society just as we do when a single unit of society commits the act.
In the latter case we unhesitatingly call the act robbery, a malum in se. It is not the law which in the first instance defines robbery, it is an ethical principle, and this the law may violate but not supersede. If by the necessity of living we acquiesce to the force of law, if by long custom we lose sight of the immorality, has the principle been obliterated? Robbery is robbery, and no amount of words can make it anything else.
We look at the results of taxation, the symptoms, to see whether and how the principle of private property is violated. For further evidence, we examine its technique, and just as we suspect the intent of robbery in the possession of effective took, so we find in the technique of taxation a telltale story. The burden of this intransigent critique of taxation, then, will be to prove the immorality of it by its consequences and its methods.
By way of preface, we might look to the origin of taxation, on the theory that beginnings shape ends, and there we find a mess of iniquity. A historical study of taxation leads inevitably to loot, tribute, ransom—the economic purposes of conquest.
The barons who put up toll-gates along the Rhine were tax-gatherers. So were the gangs who “protected,” for a forced fee, the caravans going to market. The Danes who regularly invited themselves into England, and remained as unwanted guests until paid off, called it Dannegeld; for a long time that remained the basis of English property taxes. The conquering Romans introduced the idea that what they collected from subject peoples was merely just payment for maintaining “law and order.”. For a long time the Norman conquerors collected catch-as-catchcan tribute from the English, but when by natural processes an amalgam of the two peoples resulted in a nation, the collections were regularized in custom and law and were called taxes.
It took centuries to obliterate the idea that these exactions served but to keep a privileged class in comfort and to finance their internecine wars; in fact, that purpose was never denied or obscured until constitutionalism diffused political power.
It will be seen that indirect taxation is a permission-tolive price… The inevitability of this charge on existence is expressed in the popular association of death and taxes. And it is this very characteristic that commends indirect taxation to the state, so that when you examine the prices of things you live by, you are astounded by the disproportion between the cost of production and the charge for permission to buy.
Somebody has put the number of taxes carried by a loaf of bread at over one hundred; obviously, some are not ascertainable,…
The hue and cry over the cost of living would make more sense if it were directed at taxation, the largest single item in the cost. It should be noted too that though the cost-ofliving problem affects mainly the poor, yet it is on this segment of society that the incidence of indirect taxation falls most heavily
This is necessarily so; since those in the lower earning brackets constitute the major portion of society they must account for the greatest share of consumption, and therefore for the greatest share of taxation. The state recognizes this fact in levying on goods of widest use. A tax on salt, no matter how small comparatively, yields much more than a tax on diamonds, and is of greater significance socially and economically.
It is not the size of the yield, nor the certainty of collection, which gives indirect taxation preeminence in the State’s scheme of appropriation. Its most commendable quality is that of being surreptitious. It is taking, so to speak, while the victim is not looking.
Those who strain themselves to give taxation a moral character are under obligation to explain the State’s preoccupation with hiding taxes in the price of goods. Is there a confession of guilt in that?
Direct taxes differ from indirect taxes not only in the manner of collection but also in the more important fact that they cannot be passed on; those who pay them cannot demand reimbursement from others. In the main, the inci- dence of direct taxation falls on incomes and accumulations rather than on goods in the course of exchange..
The clear-cut direct taxes are those levied on incomes, inheritances, gifts, land values. It will be seen that such appropriations lend themselves to soak-the-rich propaganda, and find support in the envy of the incompetent, the bitterness of poverty, the sense of injustice which our monopoly-economy engenders.
Direct taxation has been advocated since colonial times (along with universal suffrage), as the necessary implementation of democracy, as the essential instrument of “leveling.”…
Even as it was predicted, during the debates on the income tax in the early part of the century, the soak-the-rich label turns out to be a wicked misnomer. It was impossible for the State to contain itself once this instrument of getting additional revenue was put into its hands.…
So, in Philadelphia, the political power demands that the employer shall deduct an amount from the pay envelope and hand it over. The soak-the-rich principle has been applied on a large scale to the lowliest paid worker, not only by deductions from wages, but more so through the so-called social security taxes. These, by the way, show up the utter immorality of political power.
Social security taxation is nothing but a tax on wages, in its entirety, and was deliberately and maliciously misnamed.
Even the part which is “contributed” by the employer is ultimately paid by the worker in the price of the goods he consumes, for it is obvious that this part is merely a cost of operation and is passed on, with a mark-up.
The revenue from social security taxes is not set aside for the payment of social “benefits,” but is thrown into the general tax fund, subject to any appropriation, and when an old-age pittance is ultimately allowed it is paid out of the then current tax collections….
There are more people in the low income brackets than in the high brackets; there are more small bequests than large ones. Therefore, in the aggregate, those least able to meet the burden of soak-the-rich taxes bear the brunt of them.
Even a small tax on an income of one thousand dollars a year will cause the payer some hardship, while a fifty percent tax on fifty thousand dollars leaves something to live on comfortably…
Taxes of all kinds discourage production. Man works to satisfy his desires, not to support the State. When the results of his labors are taken from him, whether by brigands or organized society, his inclination is to limit his production to the amount he can keep and enjoy.
In principle, as the framers of the Constitution realized, the direct tax is most vicious, for it directly denies the sanctity of private property. By its very surreptition the indirect tax is a back-handed recognition of the right of the individual to his earnings; the State sneaks up on the owner, so to speak, and takes what it needs on the grounds of necessity, but it does not have the temerity to question the right of the owner to his goods
The direct tax, however, boldly and unashamedly proclaims the prior right of the State to all property. Private ownership becomes a temporary and revocable stewardship. The Jeffersonian ideal of inalienable rights is thus liquidated, and substituted for it is the Marxist concept of state supremacy.
It is by this fiscal policy, rather than by violent revolution, or by an appeal to reason, or by popular education, or by way of any ineluctable historic forces, that the substance of Socialism is realized.
Notice how the centralization hoped for by Alexander Hamilton has been achieved since the advent of the federal income tax, how the contemplated union of independent commonwealths is effectively dissolved. The common-wealths are reduced to parish status, the individual no longer is a citizen of his community but is a subject of the federal government.
All history points to the economic purpose of political power. It is the effective instrument of exploitative prac- tices. Generally speaking, the evolution of political exploi- tation follows a fixed pattern:
hit-and-run robbery, regular tribute, slavery, rent-collections. In the final stage, and after long experience, rent-collections become the prime proceeds of exploitation and the political power necessary thereto is supported by levies on production
Centuries of accomodation have inured us to the business, custom and law have given it an aura of rectitude; the public appropriation of private property by way of taxation and the private appropriation of public property by way of rent collections become unquestioned institutions. They are of our mores.
And so, as social integrations grow and the need for overall services grows apace, we turn to taxation by long habit. We know no other way. Why, then, do we object to paying taxes? Can it be that we are, in our hearts, conscious of an iniquity?
There are the conveniences of streets, kept clean and lighted, of water supply, sanitation, and so on, all making our stay in the community convenient and comfortable, and the cost must be defrayed. The cost is defrayed, out of our wages. But then we find that for a given amount of effort we earn no more than we would in a community which does not have these advantages.
Out at the margin, the rate per hour, for the same kind of work, is the same as in the metropolis. Capital earns no less, per dollar of investment, on Main Street than on Broadway. It is true that in the metropolis we have more opportunities to work, and we can work harder. In the village the tempo is slower; we work less and earn less. But, when we put against our greater earnings the rent-and-tax cost of the big city, do we have any more in satisfactions? We need not be economists to sense the incongruity.
In the first place, this doctrine unequivocally rejects the right of the individual to his property. That is basic.
Having fixed on this major premise, it jumps to the conclusion that “social need” is the purpose of all production, that man labors, or should labor, for the good of the “mass.”
Taxation is the proper means for diffusing the output of effort. It does not concern itself with the control of production or the means of acquiring property, but only with its distribution
The doctrine does not distinguish between property acquired through privilege and property acquired through production. It cannot, must not, do that, for in so doing it would question the validity of taxation as a whole.
If taxation were abolished, for instance, the cost of maintaining the social services of a community would fall on rent— there is no third source—and the privilege of appropriating rent would disappear.
If taxation were abolished, the sinecures of public office would vanish, and these constitute in the aggregate a privilege which bears most heavily on production.
If taxation were abolished, the privilege of making profits on customs levies would go out.
If taxation were abolished, public debt would be impossible, to the dismay of the bondholders.
Taxation-for-social-purposes does not contemplate the abolition of existing privilege, but does contemplate the establishment of new bureaucratic privileges. Hence it dare not address itself to the basic problem.…
The “social good” has spilled over from one private matter to another, and the definition of this indeterminate term becomes more and more elastic.
The democratic right to be wrong, misinformed, misguided or even stupid is no restraint upon the imagination of those who undertake to interpret the phrase; and whither the interpretation goes there goes the power to enforce compliance.
The ultimate of taxation-for-social-purposes is absolutism, not only because the growing fiscal power carries an equal increase in political power, but because the investment of revenue in the individual by the State gives it a pecuniary interest in him.
If the State supplies him with all his needs and keeps him in health and a degree of comfort, it must account him a valuable asset, a piece of capital. Any claim to individual rights is liquidated by society’s cash investment
The State undertakes to protect society’s investment, as to reimbursement and profit, by way of taxation. The motor power lodged in the individual must be put to the best use so that the yield will further social ends, as foreseen by the management.
Thus, the fiscal scheme which begins with distribution is forced by the logic of events into control of production. And the concept of natural rights is inconsistent with the social obligation of the individual. He lives for the State which nurtured him. He belongs to the State by right of purchase.
ALONG CAME 1950, and the Sunday supplement writers had something new to engage their talents. The achievements of the human race, especially the American branch of it, during the first half of the nineteenth century made good copy. Every accomplishment of note, in science, art, industry and sports, received proper notice. Except one…
And that one achievement of the last fifty years is far more important from the long term point of view than anything. It was the transmutation of the American character from individualist to collectivism.
The replacement of the horse-and-buggy by the automobile is startling enough; but is it as startling as the contrast between Cleveland and Truman? This is not to compare the two presidents, but to point out the remarkable change of the people they presided over.
Cleveland’s remark that the government could not take care of the people who took care of it was made because Americans thought that way; today, the handout principle of government is accepted by all good Americans, from pauper to millionaire.
At the beginning of the century the tradition of individualism that had held up since the Revolution was still going strong; by 1950, that tradition had been washed out by the caustic of socialism.
Anybody can make a machine, but the unmaking of a national character is the work of genius.
The accomplishment is too great to be ignored. A study of how it was done is in order, and it ought to be undertaken at once, before the American individualist becomes the subject of speculative archaelogy. There are still some living remnants of the species, and the traces of how our forebears thought and behaved have not been entirely obliterated. A thorough analysis of the character transformation may well serve the twenty-first century in its disillusionment, and it might well help them find their way back to a sense of freedom; provided, of course, such a work should escape the bonfire of past values that always lights up the road to socialism…
That’s how it all began. Collectivism is, after all, an idea, and the usual way of acquiring an idea is by learning… Just how socialism first invaded the campus is not recorded. Perhaps a student or two became infected at some street corner and brought the germ in. The glorious promise of socialism gave it easy access to the idealistic adolescent mind, insufficiently fortified by reason or experience….
Very few students paid much attention to the importation when it first appeared; one had enough to do to get over the hurdles of the rigid curriculum. Besides, one had to prepare oneself for the arduous task of meeting the problems of life as an individual. That was the reason for getting an education—to take care of yourself, not society. While that tradition prevailed socialism made little headway on the campus.
Shortly after the conclusion of World War I the organized socialistic student group began to appear on the campus and the apparatus of proselytizing was set up. Unauthorized posters, advertising “noted” speakers adorned the bulletin boards, and often the promise of enlightenment was augmented by the offer of refreshment… The membership of these clubs grew….
By the time the New Deal came around these socialist clubs were well organized. They had become intercollegiate in scope. At national conventions the boys and girls settled all the problems of mankind, national and international, present and future….
The effects of two decades of organization and propaganda soon became evident. Thousands of graduates of these socialistic clubs had gone out into the world. It was natural that they should enter fields in which ideas and opinions are the main stock in trade, and where training in organizational methods came in handy: the teaching profession, labor unions, social work, law and politics, and, most important, the publishing business… Jobs for the faithful became plentiful; for non-believers the opportunities became more difficult.…
The New Deal was the product of this extra-curricular work in the colleges. When the “emergency” hit Mr. Roosevelt, he had nobody to turn to for advice but the graduates of the socialist clubs. The business men were in the main devoid of any knowledge of fundamental economics, and were too bewildered by the turn of events to be of much use in the situation. The loud-mouthed theoreticians were more sanguine; besides, the books they had had published qualified them as “experts.” It would be interesting to know how many of the professors who came to the aid of Mr. Roosevelt had been associated with the socialist clubs in their college days.
The apparatus of the New Deal was most favorable for the “inevitable” idea, for it provided the sustenance necessary for effective propaganda work. No longer were the socialist workers dependent for their living on voluntary contributions; the taxpayer now fed them well, and they worked better on full stomach.
Thus it has come about that a bright young man cannot afford to entertain individualistic ideas, assuming that he has hit upon them, because such ideas carry a decided economic disadvantage. The best jobs go to those most loyal to the new Americanism.
The character of a nation reflects the way it thinks. American thought in 1950 is collectivistic because the seed of that kind of thinking was planted in the most receptive minds during the early years of the century. What we have now is the fruition of careful and assiduous husbandry.…
The growth of monopolies, the ruthlessness of their practices, presented an easy indictment of private property as a whole. It was a damaging indictment and the heart of youth was so touched by it that calm examination and analysis was precluded. The fact that monopoly is the product of politics, and that socialism was the ultimate of politics, did not occur to them, and the monopolists were in no position to bring up the matter.
Socialism, of course, proposes to substitute public for private monopoly, claiming that with the “profit motive” eliminated the evils inherent in monopoly would disappear. The inference is that under socialistic management monopoly would be an instrument for public good only; which is a variation of the “chosen people” doctrine, and that catered to the conceit of the neophyte socialists.
Then the obvious incongruity of the “boom and bust” economy helped the socialistic idea along, particularly as it came up with a plausible explanation and a cure; the going capitalism could offer neither…. Abysmal ignorance of their own philosophy, plus a smug complacency, put the practicing capitalists at a disadvantage in meeting the challenge of youth. They had been in the driver’s seat too long to consider dislodgement a possibility.
Somewhere hovering over their beclouded heads, but not bothering them at all, were the ideas of Locke, Adam Smith, Jefferson and the other libertarians of the preceding two centuries; these were like heirlooms gathering dust in the closet and never taken out for examination or appreciation. The only economic ideas the capitalists had a working acquaintance with were those conducive to piling up profits, like protective tariffs and other special privileges.
As for the doctrine of natural rights, which is the foundation of capitalistic thought, it meant nothing to them except the right to exploit their fellow-man.
Under the circumstances, the idea of socialism took root and flourished. The question now, at the half-century mark, is whether it is destined to crowd out the remaining vestiges of individualism in the American culture. It would seem so.
But, socialism is only an idea, not an historical necessity, and ideas are acquired by the human mind through education. We are not born with ideas, we learn them.
If socialism came to America because it was implanted in the minds of past generations, there is no reason for assuming that future generations will come by that idea without similar indoctrination; or that the contrary idea cannot be taught them. What the socialists have done can be undone, if there is a will for it.
But, the undoing will not be accomplished by trying to destroy established institutions. It can be accomplished only by attacking minds, and not the minds of those already hardened by socialistic fixations. Individualism can be revived by implanting the ideas in the minds of the coming generations.
So then, if those who put a value on the dignity of the individual are up to the task, they have the most challenging opportunity in education before them. It will not be an easy or quick job. It will require the kind of industry, intelligence and patience that comes with devotion to an ideal. And the only reward they can hope for is that by the end of the century the socialization of the American character will have been undone. It is, in short, a fifty-year project.
Perhaps the job should be begun by going after the preadolescent mind, even in the kindergarten grade. The socialists, it may be recalled, did not neglect to turn nursery rhymes to their use, and since the advent of the comic strip the communists (or advanced socialists) have employed this medium of indoctrination. But, that is a specialized effort that could be well deferred until the college mind, the mind that will soon enter the active arena, is taken care of. The assault must begin on the campus.
Assault is the proper word, and the proper attitude, for the proposed job. The possibility of winning over the faculty might well be dismissed, simply because the faculty is largely beyond redemption; it is both the cause and the effect of the condition that is to be corrected.…
That tactic, moreover, will find favor with the students, particularly those endowed with the gift of intellectual curiosity; to be able to controvert the dicta of the professor is always a sophomoric delight. To win the student over to the idea of individualism it is necessary to equip him with doubts regarding the collectivistic doctrines insinuated in the lecture rooms, or the text books.
If the suggested undertaking should apply itself to a refutation of the “adopted’’ texts, especially in the fields of economics and government, a veritable revolution could be started on the campus; socialism is replete with dictates unsupported by empiric data, and therefore lends itself to easy refutation.